P2P site complains to police about 'illegal' tactics.
Controversial file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has filed a criminal complaint to Swedish police in which it accuses 10 media companies of attacking its website.
The charges include "infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming all on a commercial level".
The Pirate Bay said in a blog posting that the company now has "proof of the things we've been suspecting for a long time; the big record and movie labels are paying professional hackers, saboteurs and ddosers to destroy our trackers".
The 'proof' comes in the form of almost 700MB of internal company email leaked from anti-piracy detective agency MediaDefender, which is acting for the media companies.
The Pirate Bay claims that MediaDefender employee Jay Mairs forwarded all his company emails to a Gmail account, which was infiltrated by a group of hackers calling themselves 'MediaDefender-Defenders'.
The Pirate Bay obtained a copy of the leaked emails and identified the companies mentioned before reporting them to the police.
It emerged in July that MediaDefender, hired by the Motion Picture Association of America, attempted to lure file sharers to a fake download site called MiiVi.com.
The site installed spyware which checked hard drives for copyrighted material and reported back to MediaDefender.
However, given the dubious nature in which the MediaDefender emails were obtained, there is some doubt as to whether they will be admissible as evidence under Swedish law.
The emails apparently reveal previously undisclosed details about the MiiVi site, as well as an alleged collaboration with the New York Attorney General's office on a secret law enforcement project.
The Pirate Bay named the following companies in its complaint:
Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
EMI Music Sweden AB
Universal Music Group Sweden AB
Universal Pictures Nordic AB
Paramount Home Entertainment Sweden AB
Atari Nordic AB
Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (UK) Ltd
Ubisoft Sweden AB
Sony BMG Music Entertainment Sweden AB
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB